


To Show You What You Mean to Me

by Fenhello



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Crestwood (Dragon Age), F/M, Fade Nonsense, Feelings, Solas POV, but hes also always wrong, even if he did tell the truth, i mean...its hard to see crestwood going well, silly old egg, so solas is sort of right, sort of a headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 17:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18782533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fenhello/pseuds/Fenhello
Summary: Trust her. Trust her. Trust her, sounds the last of his hope. It has to shout to be heard underneath a mountain of bones.But he hears it.And this time he chooses to listen.-aka-The one where the Crestwood conversation goes tits up for a different reason.





	To Show You What You Mean to Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hezjena2023](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hezjena2023/gifts).



> Just a little tool around after a conversation with Hezjena2023 about the Crestwood breakup.
> 
> Update: Now has an amazing sequel care of Hezjena2023. https://archiveofourown.org/works/18808603

The veil is thin here.

The sensation of it shudders over their skin and brings with it, faintly, a familiar taste. A crispness like cracked frost. A sweetness like fresh water. A warmth like her fingers, tangled up in his.

“I was trying to determine some way to show you what you mean to me,” he confesses.

He has been dreaming and searching, specifically. For a place where a memory might yet linger. Where the past might be unpicked from visions of centuries worth of blood and sorrow.

In this place, he has seen a human girl- prized in her village for her sweetness and her beauty- sitting down by the water to comb her golden hair. By blue tinged moonlight, a red-dye merchant watched her from the shadows.

His fingers were permanently stained red by the ochre he picked to trade with and he had led a wandering life. It took him by her village often. With each visit he would look for the girl, watch her comb her hair and _want_ her.

In memories that stained the fade, Solas had seen the girl first. She cowered before a terrible red creature, stepping out from the shadows. It touched her face and she trembled, when he twined his blood coloured fingers through her golden hair, she screamed.

In another moment, he saw the reddleman. His face was a picture of horror. He’d stained the lily white skin of the girl and had disgusted her. The desire to silence her, to hold her and keep her, to fix her to a moment of perfect stillness was an impulse that he fought with and lost.

The scar of the girl, strangled by her golden hair, is written on the veil. Her murder lies cupped and kept where the rocks curve, where the pfool lies stagnant and where the trees arch to hide the stars.

And underneath, like sifting through stones for a shell, he found what he was searching for.

“I’m listening,” she says, with a smile that curves with promise. “And I can offer a few suggestions.”

“I shall bear that in mind.”

Solas struggles with desire, not unlike the red dye merchant. Her eyes are wide and full of wonder, her smile is bright and beautiful. He touches her face and wants to fix it in place. Fix it and hold it for eternity.

And all the while, his chest goes pounding with the primal fear of a strangled girl.

The memory he must show her is not a good one. Nowhere near the worst of them, but far from the best. There is a possibility- near enough to certainty- that she will never look at him like this again.

 _You don’t have to tell her,_ a whisper reminds him. Amongst a haze of deception and omission, they have carved out a handful of simple truths: An old and lonely wanderer loves a beautiful and brilliant woman and the thought of it is warm and wonderful. It could easily be enough.

He takes a breath. Already his mind is darting ahead, anticipating her next moves, her next words, the looks that she will give him. He sees her fear and her anger, her disgust and her hate. She’s going to fall from his fingers like water. It will happen the instance she knows.

 _Trust her. Trust her. Trust her_ , sounds the last of his hope. It has to shout to be heard underneath a mountain of bones.

But he hears it.

And this time he chooses to listen.

“Lie with me, Vhenan?” he asks.

He loves the way her sharp eyes narrow. There’s a question in them. There’s a flood of desire too.

“Just here? Like this?”

“There is something I have to show you. And this will be easier for me in the fade.”

“I’ll never understand,” she laughs. “How you can seduce me and sound so like a man sentenced to the gallows at the same time.”

She’s teasing, raising his knuckles to kiss them, but her uncanny sensibility of things still has the ability to unseat him.

Solas pulls both of their hands to his face, untwisting her fingers and opening up her palm. He puts his lips to the skin around the anchor, shutting his eyes tightly, shuddering at her scent, feeling the delicate equilibrium between the pull of his magic and the pull of her skin and her warmth and her spirit.

Her palm is blistered. It’s burned. There again comes the sensation of slipping.

But she’s on her knees now, tugging him downwards. He stumbles stupidly after her, and it still isn’t too late to pull away.

Like knotting vines, her hands loop underneath his arms and encircle his waist. She twines herself across him, her arms and breasts and thighs, pressing close and complicating their bodies together. Like a lover’s knot that refuses to be untangled.

It still isn’t too late to pull away.

And suddenly they are lying down and his heart is aching. He touches her hair and he kisses her, trying to hold back and be delicate about it. But- like all the times before- he fails and he falls and pours all of his shame and his fear and his desperation into her.

“Mmm,” she murmurs, breaking away from a bruising kiss and he hates that he loves how much pain she can take.

It sends a sick thrill through him. He hates that he’s been the cause of so much of it. It reassures him. She is strong enough weather the worst of the wolves. It reminds him how wretched this world really is.

She strokes his chest as she settles into it. He knows she can feel his heart racing, she pulls her head up and says, trying to be comforting, “Show me, Solas.”

Her smile is like a spirit of simple courage, he thinks, kissing her forehead, twining his fingers through her hair and watching her drift into dreams.

It is always easy to find her in the Fade.

A solid presence amongst half-conscious shadows, she calls out, sharp and shining, and he steps into the small grotto, finding her hand to act as his anchor.

The spirits have already begun to enact the tragedy of Lily-white and the Reddleman. He watches her watching them for a moment.

“The villagers lynched the trader,” he says, cutting the story short, boiling with anticipation. “When they found him cradling her body, they strung him up from the tree. Inches from where he strangled her.”

She looks over at the tree with an inscrutable expression. Her anger for the girl is easy enough to predict, but he wonders if she pities the reddleman.

“Funny sort of date this,” she says flatly .

“Too grim and fatalistic for your tastes?”

“A bit. You might have tipped over into ghoulish with this one. But...I suppose Orlesians do this too, don’t they? Putting on tragedies for entertainment.”

“Staged tragedies tend to be more hyperbolic,” he points out. “Tales of great kings and noblemen, epic battles, and men destroyed by ambition, madness and greed.”

“I read one of those plays in the library at Skyhold,” she says, still staring at the tree. “It reminded me of Emerald Knights. The story of Elandrin and his human love, specifically. The backdrop was an epic battle, but -like this one-  the tragedy was only ever about two people. Trapped by fate.”

What kind of power would it take, he wonders, to wrap his arms around her waist and pull her out from under the crush of their own looming tragedy?

More power than he possesses, Solas is sure. More than the heart of a titan might grant him. More power than Mythal and her kin ever hoarded at their fullest.

“This wasn’t why I brought you here,” he confesses. “Their deaths wounded the veil, but the fade contains other memories I wished to show you. They are much older. They will be much fainter,” he warns. “It might even be...difficult...for you. To understand what you see.”

“I’ve felt like that a lot recently. We’ll manage.”

If he could convince himself that the memory of her face, looking up at him with such fathomless love, could be enough to sustain him then he might be able to find a place in this world just as easily.

But he cannot do either.

He wills the grove to shift around him and for the spirits to settle into new shapes. Before the change is complete he adds thickly, “I love you,” and he swallows. “I would ask you to remember that.”

The first time he’s said it in the common tongue and he can’t help but make it sound like a threat.

Hesitant and nervous, she takes his hand.

“I love you too?”

The first time she’s said it and she can't help but make it sound like a question.  

Here again comes a memory of the grove by moonlight. This dream is dark, and the moons are as thin as the sharp side of a blade.

Soldiers dressed in gold are sitting down to dinner, marked for Andruil and taking shelter under Ghilan’nain’s protection. The towering stone harts, arranged about the water, are not static in this time. They snort and they paw with stone hoofs at their stone plinths. They clash their great horns together.

Ancient protective magic sits heavy on the air. The soldiers joke and lounge about the camp, certain of their safety.

Solas is only looking at her.

She is taking in the soldiers; their finery, their markings and her clever mind is telling her that these are ancient memories. 

From the mouth of the cave, dancing veilfire floods the camp with green light. The taste of the air changes. As if it were an instrument, changing the pitch of the world to a minor key. The soldiers stand up, watching the cave entrance. The fade cracks like a whip. The air seems to burn.

Then comes the chaos.

And a handful of men and women drop from the rocks behind the camp. They wear no uniform, swathed in dark, hastily stitched clothing, like the very shadows of the gilded soldiers. The initial wave of death is swift and bloody. A collision of diaphanous, fade-touched weapons, spirits and magic.

“What am I looking at, Solas?”

Her jaw has a hard set to it. He can’t read her.

The blood catches the starlight and shimmers with the shifting perspectives. People fighting for freedom. A massacre causing nothing but chaos and bloodshed. Soldiers unknowingly fighting to preserve a cruel system. Men and women fighting to preserve the only lives they have ever known.

“These were not soldiers,” he feels the need to explain, as the rebels slit throats. “They were outnumbered, outmanned and outpowered. Their best tactics lay in small raids by night. Whilst the enemy camped, they harassed. If the enemy attacked, they had orders to retreat. If the enemy tired, they had orders to strike.”

It was a game he had tried to play with patience. Guerrilla warfare. Using clusters of fighters who could move swiftly. Winning the hearts and minds of the people as the losses climbed into the thousands. Convinced that he could outlast his enemies. Convinced that freedom could be negotiated as a consequence of a war that the evanuris could no longer justify the cost of fighting.

But then they’d killed Mythal…and when all time slipped from his grasp, when he felt his grand and clever plans melt into nothing, he’d donned his long cast aside armour, emblazoned for Her.

That was when he haphazardly opened up the floodgates. And a thousand mistakes poured forth from that moment.

“It was a bitter, bloody, war of attrition,” he says heavily. “Many people died for nothing but the vaguest notion of freedom.”

“And who was doing the fighting?”

“The people were fighting. Against their leaders,” he tells her. “Leaders who enslaved. Leaders who abused their power and forgot their responsibility to those who followed them. Leaders who killed and hurt with impunity.”

She will understand, he tries to tell himself. She leads her Inquisition in full awareness of the hazards and consequences of power. She sees herself as a leader should be: a servant of the people and not a slave owner.

Still.

He wishes he could have found her a better memory.

Solas has already seen this raid play out in its entirety. If only to confirm that he truly was the one under the Dread Wolf’s mantle.

Sending a friend in his stead had been one of their favourite tricks. A necessary part of the posturing. It let the enemy think he had won more ground in the eluvian network. It made the people think he could appear in many places at once.

He looks at the dead and feels shame that he can barely remember this night.So many of the battles are forgotten now. So many of the dead will never be mourned. Smothered by the veil, scrawled over by centuries of bloodshed.

When the survivors of the slaughter are forced onto their knees, the Dread Wolf steps from out of the shadows, shrouded under a wolf pelt. He identifies their leader, looking from gilded armour to gilded armour, finding out a bright and shiny medal.

The commander looks up and sneers. He spits at his captors in a long dead language.

“He said, _I have no reason to fear you, Dread Wolf. Kill me swiftly or kill me slowly, you will get no information from me,”_ Solas translates. They are still holding hands, standing at the centre, surrounded by the swirling bloodshed.

“I know,” she says, holding her fingers a little limply inside of his. “The Well of Sorrows told me. Does that mean that this is…”

“Yes.”

“But he’s just a man….underneath a wolf’s pelt .”

“Essentially,” says Solas with a smile shaped more like a grimace. “What else would he be? A monster who stalks the nightmares of children? A demon who prowls through the fade?”

“That would be the Dalish take on him, yes,” she murmurs. She doesn’t take her eyes away from the scene.

A pained expression crosses over her face and he knows the Well of Sorrows is whispering to her.

Since the commander will not give away secrets of the movement of evanuris troops through this territory, the Dread Wolf will kill him. Messily.

A fate that will find the next person he questions far more amenable.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,”Solas says softly. “You would never have believed me. You would have thought I was mad. But you needed to know…”

She breaks away from him, and goes towards the centre of the chaos. She stares closely at the spirits, taking on the loose shape of the memory.

His hand feels the loss of her.

“You-” she begins. Frowns, purses her lips and turns her head to stare at him. He shifts the dream slightly, removing traces of a long forgotten massacre and of Lily-White and the Reddleman.

Now the moons are fat and full, reflected in the stillness of the shallow pool of water.

“So you’re not...? You were never….” she whispers.

He can see it. All over her face. The slow movement of mourning and the heavy recognition that there has been a loss. _Not and never_ , as opposed to _are and were_

A bright and brilliant woman loved an old and lonely wanderer. And then a Wolf snapped him between his jaws.

“I was Solas first,” he insists.

“And a fragment of Fen’Harel came to you? Like Flemeth and Mythal?”

“No. I have always been this.”

“Two immortal gods in as many weeks,” she jokes weakly. “I am drastically redefining my conceptualisation of _always_.”

“What is the old Dalish curse?” he tries to joke back at her. “May the Dread Wolf take you?”

It is absolutely the wrong thing to say. She pulls back sharply, as if burned. Half-formed apologies rise up in his throat:

_No. No. I did not. It was never like that. I would not lay with you under false pretences. I love you._

“Why tell me this?” she demands. “Why now?”

“Because the Dalish tell stories that contain little more than an ounce of truth. Because there is grit at the heart of the pearls they have fashioned over centuries. Because you deserve better. Because you need to hear the truth.”

She shakes her head frantically. When he tries to step towards her, she steps backwards, recoiling in horror. And all of his worst fears are confirmed.

“I didn't show you this to hurt you,” he pleads. “Not you. Never you.”

“I….I can’t,” is all she says. “Why did you have to…” she looks down at her hand, closes it around the place where she is marked by him. Marred by him. But without malice. And she lets out a quiet gasp that breaks his heart.

Then she whispers:

“None of it was real.”

At the same time as he urges:

“ _Wake up_.”

On the other side of dreams, the waking is heavier than it has been for months. Of course it is- any kind of lightness has been her doing. All this time, her busy hands have been at work on him, assembling the scattered pieces of himself that he had thought were ruined with the rest of Elvhenan. 

She is retreating when he stirs. Barely more than a flash of hair and colour and light. For a moment he considers calling out to her:

_Don’t leave me, my love. Not now._

But pride is the thing which thickens the words in his throat and he stays silent.

This world’s moments of beauty, he reminds himself, are brief. Little more than an addled spark of frenzied, misguided emotion. Impossible to capture, they are there and then gone like a laugh to the winds. Better to put his thoughts to the real things. To the ones that will actually last. 

As with all things, it is worse when he is wrong. And it is worse when he is right.


End file.
